News

New Quilt Executive Committee Members February 25, 2012

New Quilt Executive Committee Members

Tuesday, January 31, 2012

The Quilt Board of Directors recently completed its annual election for The Quilt Executive Committee. The Quilt is pleased to announce three new members will join the Committee as of 2012 for two-year terms: Don Welch, president and CEO, Merit Network; Veronica Sarjeant, Chief Operating Officer, Florida LambdaRail; and Claude Garelik, System IT Security Officer, South Dakota Board of Regents and Chairman of the Board for Great Plains Network. The nine-member Executive Committee provides ongoing oversight of Quilt affairs as delegated by the full Board.


The Board also completed its officer elections for 2012. Garelik was elected to the office of Vice Chairman for 2012. In accordance with Quilt bylaws, the 2011 Vice Chairman, Wendy Huntoon, Director of Networking at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center who manages the Three Rivers Optical Exchange (3ROX), was elected to the Chair position for this year. Wendy replaces James Deaton, Chief Technology Officer of OneNet . Mike Phillips, Executive Director of LEARN, was re-elected to the office of Treasurer.

“As a member-powered organization, The Quilt is very fortunate to have not only a tremendous breadth of talent among our members but also a strong commitment to go above and beyond in contributing their leadership to the support of advanced regional networking for research and education,” said Jen Leasure, Quilt president and CEO. “I congratulate the new Executive Committee members and officers on their election and look forward to another highly productive year of working together.”

About The Quilt

The Quilt is the national coalition of advanced regional networks for research and education, representing 28 networks across the country. Participants in The Quilt provide advanced network services and applications to over 200 universities and thousands of other educational institutions.

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Governor Kasich Announces Ten-Fold Boost to Ohio’s Broadband Network February 07, 2012

Governor Kasich Announces Ten-Fold Boost to Ohio’s Broadband Network

Ohio’s High-Speed Network Will Lead Nation in Unprecedented Statewide Initiative to Advance Cutting Edge Research and Job Creation

Columbus, OH – Feburary 7, 2012 – Ohio will soon see a ten-fold boost to its broadband network speeds, which will benefit research and job-creating assets statewide. Governor John R. Kasich made the announcement at his State of the State address in Steubenville today, highlighting the first ever state-led initiative that will leverage astonishing network speeds of 100 Gigabits (Gbps) per second to advance research and job growth across Ohio’s medical research, higher education, manufacturing, engineering and technology networking corridors.

“This is a game changer for Ohio. These almost unfathomable speeds are highly sought by leading researchers and job creators in competitive markets around the world,” Ohio Board of Regents Chancellor Jim Petro said. “This will solidify Ohio’s standing as a technology leader thanks to the vision of our many public and private partners.”

Under a recently approved agreement with Cisco and Juniper, Ohio will invest approximately $10 million to harness new innovative technology that will, in essence, “open the faucet” of Ohio’s current broadband infrastructure, over 1,800 miles of fiber, from its current 10 Gbps capacity to 100 Gbps. At this speed, every one of Ohio’s 1.8 million enrolled K-12 students could download an eBook simultaneously in just over two minutes.

This expansion leverages the fiber optic network operated by OARnet, a member of the Ohio Board of Regents Ohio Technology Consortium. The 100 Gbps network will connect Ohio’s major metropolitan areas to northern and southern connection points of Internet2, a nationwide advanced networking consortium led by the research and education community, spanning U.S. and international institutions who are leaders in the worlds of research, academia, industry and government.

For the network, $8.1 million will fund hardware development for Phase 1, which will connect Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, Dayton and Toledo by June 2012 and Phase 2 markets of Akron, Athens and Youngstown by October 2012.

Ohio public and private partners also will invest $2.3 million in a state-of-the-art innovation center that will enable and test 100 Gbps technologies and promote the development of compelling broadband, software and advanced technology applications. Located at The Ohio State University, the center will operate in research collaboration with Internet2, NSF-Future Internet Infrastructure (GENI), UC-Berkeley and other national laboratories.

Today’s groundbreaking announcement is well received from many companies and organizations that currently utilize Ohio’s robust technology resources:

Tom Lange, Procter & Gamble’s Director of Corporate Research and Development Modeling and Simulation: “This is a big win for Ohio. It puts us on the 21st Century Digital Highway, which will help big businesses, mid-sized companies and small developing firms. At P&G, Ohio’s Supercomputing capacity and the high-speed network that supports it, allows P&G to model and simulate our products, and production systems, thus lowering costs and improving consumers experiences with our products. For small and mid-sized Ohio companies, many of which are P&G suppliers, this game changing ‘data highway’ upgrade gives them greater access to and use of modeling & simulation that can improve their products and thus help their businesses grow and to compete globally.”

Dr. Philip Payne, Associate Professor & Chair, Department of Biomedical Informatics at The Ohio State University and Executive Director for the Center for IT Innovation in Healthcare: “Analyzing complex genomic information in order to deliver healthcare informed by the most up to date science consumes massive amounts of data. Until now, the speed and capacity needed to transmit this data between research facilities and healthcare systems throughout the state was non-existent and we had to physically ship large external hard drives between institutions. At these new speeds and bandwidth, we will now be able to transmit enormous genomic data sets with the click of a button to anyone connected to the network in just minutes. This is an incredible technological breakthrough for the medical research and clinical care communities, and will lead to improvements in health for every Ohioan.”

Caroline Whitacre, Vice President for Research for The Ohio State University: “Ohio’s research broadband backbone is already the envy of many other states. Accelerating its capacity to 100 Gbps will make Ohio even more attractive to medical research, manufacturing, engineering and other technology sectors. This will put Ohio far ahead of the pack in university research collaboration and competition for federal grants.”

Fact sheet and more information on Ohio’s 100 Giabit Network and Innovation Center is available here.

Download a PDF of this Press Release here.

About the Ohio Technology Consortium (OH-TECH)
The Ohio Board of Regents Ohio Technology Consortium (OH-Tech) includes the Ohio Academic Resources Network (OARnet), the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) and eStudent Services. OH-TECH serves as the umbrella organization for these three organizations, which offer innovative technology resources and services for Ohio higher education, K-12 schools and state and local government. http://oh-tech.org

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Regional Network Futures Report November 08, 2011

Regional Network Futures Report

Advanced Regional Networks (ARNs) play a unique and vital role in America’s broadband future, according to a report published October 31, the outcome of a two-day workshop on “Envisioning the Future of Advanced Regional and State Networks.” Supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and hosted by the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, the workshop was attended by over 30 experts in the development and operation of ARNs as well leaders from the national research and education (R&E) networking community and industry.

“Over the past 25 years,” according to the report, “ARNs have played a critical role in the deployment of the Internet within the United States and the development of the global Internet itself. . . Today ARNs are expanding to serve entirely new sets of organizations, but are finding that they must adapt to do so. In fact, we are now at an inflection point unlike any other in the forty-year history of R&E networking, with ARNs facing an intersection of increasing opportunities and rising challenges. To realize their full potential, ARNs must reach a common vision for their future development, fundamentally reevaluating core issues such as funding, form, and function.”

For ARNs to realize their full potential as innovation platforms, the report makes a number of recommendations to the ARN community:

  • Broaden the collaboration among ARNs to provide coherence for users
  • Develop sustainable and coordinated funding models
  • Strengthen the partnership and alignment between ARNs and national organizations
  • Expand the leadership and coordination roles of the National Science Foundation
  • Increase collaboration on new and advanced services
  • Join forces to inform policy makers at the state, regional, and national levels

For full report, please visit:   https://www.mcnc.org/sites/default/files/arn-workshop-white-paper-31-oct-2011.pdf.

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